America

For some reason or other I have come to teach my nephew World History. Yesterday while teaching, I found a description in his textbook that "America" was named after Amerigo Vespucci who explored south American continent. As far as I know this is not as straight forward as that. The following is based on a book i read a few years ago (written by Bill Brison).
Vespucci was rather a man of obscurity running a ship supply business. Christopher Columbus was one of his customers. It is true that Vespucci made a couple of voyages to the land, today America, but always just as a passenger. He was not an accomplished seafarer as many textbooks refers to him. Yet letters began circulating in Florence, collected under the title "New World", which stated that Vespucci had not only been captain of these voyages but had discovered the New World. In fact, one of the letters which was allegedly written during a voyage down along the coast of South America said "this land is worth calling the New World." The general interpretation of this letter is that the author was the first to decide that it was not Asia, against the general belief that it was a part of Asia (As Columbus insisted). This interpretation itself is controversial already. It is possible to think that the author still believed it was a part of Asia and New World. Even if it's right at all, the problem is the author of the letters is still controversial even to date.

The mistake would probably have gone no further except that a German geographer named マルチン・ワルドゼーミュラー was working on a revised edition of the map of Ptolemy(プトレマイオス). In the course of his research he stumbled upon the Florentine letters. He was impressed with the spurious account of Vespucci's exploit, hook-line-and-sinker, and inadvertently named the massive continent in his honor. Although at that time it only referred to only South America, later its northern counterpart got to be called North America. Thus his name represents two of the five major continent. No one got more merit from less activity than the shadowy Italian businessman.
If the above credit written in the textbooks about Vespucci was wrong, he still had one possible, if marginal, claim to fame which no textbooks refer to. He is believed to have been the brother of Simonetta Vespucci, the model for Venus in the famous painting by Botticelli.
Incidentally, this may be a good example on how we should learn World History. The nephew I am teaching has long struggled memorizing historical events in the world almost blindly and mechanically without knowing any kind of such stories about them. World history is one of the most interesting subjects if we are curious about how and why events happened. If he knows this story how will he be able to forget that Botticelli, Columbus and Vespucci lived in about the same period in the history. Something is definitely wrong with the way teachers nowadays teach history... and any subjects.